Chapter 7 considers the boundary for the end of girlhood under international law. It applies Welby’s Meaning Triad to discuss the sense, meaning and significance of the current definition of child in the CRC. It argues that this definition is problematic on several grounds: absence of a minimum age for the end of girlhood, discrepancy between the end of girlhood and emancipation, possibility of unequal treatment on the grounds of gender, national domicile, and between girls under domestic law. It examines positive features of the CRC and the benefit for girls to be covered until eighteen years. It also analyzes ‘childist’ provisions of the CRC and empowering provisions of other treaties, and whether girls should reach majority before eighteen years. It conducts case studies of child justice and child marriage. Finally, it employs semioethics to identify amendments to the definition of child in the CRC that would tackle its shortcomings.

In developmental processes and outcomes, the individual and the context are inextricably connected throughout the lifespan. As an individual from an unorthodox background, my academic career is full of continuities and discontinuities, as one of the most influential books from my advisor, Jerome Kagan, asserted. In retrospect, my upbringing gave me the cultural, ethnic, minority worldview. From the start my education gave me the opportunity to have essential intellectual tools and eventually become bicultural and critical of our academic field. Consistently and strategically, my scholarly, administrative, and volunteer work led to questioning and pushing boundaries of the dominant academic canon; this was achieved by making critical connections with like-minded scholars and institutions, and working directly at the top of mainstream scholarship, educational institutions, and professional organizations. A contextual developmental analysis of my academic trajectory provides evidence of the constant, powerful dialectic relationship of the individual and the context. It all makes sense now.

While reaction ruled, Germany was in the midst of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and overall modernization, and the Jews were often considered as prime agents of this development. However, a close look discloses Jewish communities living mainly in small towns, working in local commerce and in traditional branches of industry. Still, it seems that they were moving forward more quickly than others, more easily accepting change, enjoying more favorable demographic trends, and quickly improving their educational level. As a typical example, the chapter presents a sketch of one family history, that of the Liebermanns, who held on to their commercial interests in cotton and silk, but then slowly expanded to become larger-scale industrial entrepreneurs, centered in Berlin and later in Silesia too, gradually moving to more modern and more large-scale production sectors. On the whole, the Jewish way of modernization added one more route to the multiple varieties of such routes in Germany. Through their unique perspective, the various possibilities of moving towards modernity are more easily perceived, enriching the overall picture of this process as a whole, especially in Germany.

Sex and minority groups such as LGBT, sexual desire and sexual identity as fluid or dimensional phenomena, differences (or lack of differences) in desire in minority groups, special issues in relationships for minority groups such as discrimination, and effects of ageing,

This chapter analyzes different fields of Buddhist constitutionalism in contemporary Myanmar, arguing for expanding the study of Buddhist constitutionalism to include “secular” civil law and the Penal Code, which prima facie promote equality between religious and ethnic groups. Thus, the key regulatory issue at stake is not only sangha affairs, but also the privileging of Buddhism vis-à-vis other religions in a wide array of policies and state law. This broad approach opens up for identifying multiple aspects of Buddhist constitutionalism, such as unwritten or “living” forms of Buddhist constitutionalism, in addition to its political forms and manifestations. This practice of Buddhist statecraft is, however, challenged by ethnic and religious minority communities in Myanmar. After the 2021 military coup, the democratic opposition in its new “Federal Democracy Charter” declared an end to Buddhist constitutional privileges, while the military junta positions itself as the protector of Buddhist constitutionalism as enshrined in the 2008 Constitution.

Romanian Germans came to exist as a group under the pressure of political circumstances after 1918. In the century that followed, Romanian Germans tried to make sense of their experiences in modern Europe through their stories and memories. If the story is ostensibly about a shrinking group of German speakers mainly from the Banat and Transylvania in Romania, the introduction frames their century as a study of practices of identity, memory, and transnational migration. In an introductory excursion into Romanian Germans as a group, this chapter sets out ground-breaking ways of understanding minorities. The introduction challenges scholars to reassess the performative element of identity and memory, moving away from essentialist explanations of minorities and diaspora towards a more vibrant and transnational approach.

This chapter offers a-state-of-the-art review of the status and use of the Arabic language in North America. The chapter consists of six sections. The first section is an introduction to the Arabic language, its diglossic situation, and the geographic distribution of its speakers. The second section presents a brief history of Arab-speaking immigrants in North America as well as their demographic and sociolinguistic background. The third section focuses on the acquisition, development, and attrition/loss of colloquial Arabic by child and adult heritage speakers of Arabic. The fourth section explores the acquisition of Standard Arabic by heritage Arabic speakers in college-level Arabic-language classrooms. This section also considers some of the main differences between heritage speakers and second language learners of Arabic. The fifth section examines factors influencing Arabic language maintenance and loss among heritage speakers, including sociolinguistic, socio-contextual, and socio-affective factors (e.g., language input, language use, language attitudes, identity sentiments, family support, and the sociopolitical situation of Arab immigrants). The sixth and final section discusses the future of Arabic in the United States based on current trends and proposes directions for future research.

This provides the rationale for the book and outlines the main argument. It provides a synopsis of the eight chapters and the conclusion. The central argument of the book is made explicit: the need to move beyond existing tropes, especially religion, that have defined Sikh subjectivities. It outlines the integrated approach to Sikh nationalism, identity and diaspora which offers a more comprehensive understanding of Sikh aspirations for self-determination since the late nineteenth century. The Sikh case, it suggests, provides new insights into minority religious nationalism in the colonial and postcolonial contexts and questions the centrality of the homeland in the discourse of long-distance nationalism in a globalised world, thus making possible de-territorialised nationalism.

The Introduction invites readers to consider the link between two things that are both true, but rarely considered as equal parts of the same whole: first, disadvantaged groups are not well represented in Congress, and second, some members of Congress do prioritize the representation of the disadvantaged. The book opens with short case descriptions of several members of Congress who are expressly known for their advocacy on behalf of disadvantaged groups. It then introduces the central question of why these members would make the choice to emphasize the disadvantaged in their representational strategy, and what makes them different from other members who choose to work on behalf of more advantaged groups. It also makes a case for why disadvantaged groups are particularly worthy of study, and what they can teach us about group representation more broadly.

Hamilton Carroll considers shifting trends across nearly two decades of post-9/11 novels from early works grappling with the unrepresentability of terror to recent narratives by Susan Choi, Mohsin Hamid, Joseph O’Neill, and Jess Walter that depict the everyday experiences of racialized precarity in a period of perpetual warfare, nuclear proliferation, migration catastrophes, and neo-ethnonationalisms. Political turmoil and violence by state and non-state entities remain central to twenty-first century life, even as the events of September 11, 2001, have shifted from recent trauma to historical retrospection.

This chapter examines contemporary queer Asian American literature’s persistent and pervasive critiques of the Asian American family’s disciplining of nonnormative genders and sexualities, on the one hand, and mainstream LGBTQ formations’ anti-Asian racism, on the other. In tracking these dual modes of critique, the chapter suggests that the queer Asian American subject’s displacement from both model minority heteronormativity and queer liberal homonormativity implies that it cannot be enfolded into and conscripted to serve the ideology of US imperial sexual exceptionalism. In consequence, queer Asian American literature has had to imagine and lay claim to alternative forms of belonging, whether by documenting queer people of color spaces and socialities or by inserting queer presences into conventional Asian/American histories.